The cause, which I only found out by chance, AFTER I changed the batteries in my wireless keyboard. When I say close, I mean arm length. The HTC Desire power charger throws out enough electrical interference, to cause the keyboard to drop characters.

In the “things I saw ten years ago and never thought I’d see again” category, we recently had the case of the HP 8000 Elite PC which refused to burn DVDs. I offered a couple of “these are really clutching at straws” type suggestions, and behold, the “try a different DVD brand” suggestion actually worked.

The customer purchased a good brand of DVD Media, and all was well. (Alas, there is no DVD firmware update from HP which fixes the issue).

I love the Apple iPod charger. Apple call it the iPod charger, but this is the same charger you get with the iPhone.

It supplies 5 volts @ 1 Amp. Just what you want when you need to charge your non-Apple USB devices. Pictured below are the iPhone 4 & BlackBerry 9000 Bold. There’s three cables in the photo. The missing device is the HTC Desire PDA, which I used to take the photo.

And the other thing I like about having one charger? In my travel kit, I can take the one charger with me as a backup to using the laptop as a USB charger.

I liked the DiskDigger un-delete program. Out of the four un-deletion programs I recommended here, DiskDigger was my first choice.

Fast forward to now.

I stupidly deleted a temp file on a USB memory disk, and needed it back. So I downloaded a copy of DiskDigger.

Not very happy now.

“Without a license key, DiskDigger will pop up an annoying message box that gently reminds you to purchase a key. It does, of course, allow you to continue without a key, and even proceeds to recover your files. However, it will keep popping up the message box for every file you’re trying to recover. So just buy a license key already! It’s a lot less expensive than comparable utilities out there.”
– DiskDigger FAQ

Hey, I’ve got no problems in buying a license key, even if the program is “free” for personal use. I do have a problem with a program which introduces a five second delay “nag” screen for every file it wants to recover.

Was my first attempt at successfully cleaning a keyboard in a dishwasher a fluke? Well no, as it turns out.

Today’s candidate? A 2 year old HP branded keyboard. As the photo below shows, it was one grotty keyboard. This time around, I used the “FAST” dishwasher setting. When I took the keyboard out of the dishwasher, about a cupful (250ml) of water drained out. 3 days later, the keyboard was ready to use.

Westpac Bank losing a whole data centre floor of these 3380 DASDs in the late 1980’s when the water-based fire sprinklers went off.

That ASIO, instead of trading in their old 3380’s, had the disks ground up. Information security was the reason given.

A computer operator, during a mainframe shutdown procedure, thinking that because the 3380 was taking too long to power off, flicked the emergency power off switch. Resetting the switch required a visit from an IBM Customer Service Engineer.

Disks shattering at (high rotational) speed, and exploding out the side of the cabinet. Urban myth, or not? Heard it happening from a number of mainframe operators over the years. So there might be a grain of truth there.

Vacant data centre floors caused by the 3380 & 3390’s being replaced by the much smaller IBM 9394 RAMAC units.